Punting Martin Parkinson a symbol of Tony Abbott’s folly

Ten months into the Abbott government, you can’t be sure the search for a replacement for Treasury secretary Martin Parkinson is not just one of those apparently pig-headed, possibly ideological decisions to do things differently for the sake of it. Photo: Bloomberg

Canberra observed

Laura Tingle

The Prime Minister’s Office has started an international search to replace Treasury secretary Martin Parkinson.

At first, that may appear a “fact-ette” far removed from the dramas of the past two weeks in the Senate. But it isn’t entirely.

Once you cut through the colour of the last parliamentary fortnight, it is striking how much of the “drama” has been no more than people not knowing what they were doing.

And now the spectre of someone being appointed to head Treasury who might not know anything about either the Australian economy or Australian politics.

Of course, such an international search offers the possibility of embracing the diaspora of smart economists and policymakers who have spent time in Canberra but moved on to other things. Members of such a group might bring valuable experience back to Canberra. So you’d hope that it is the thinking behind the move.

But 10 months into the Abbott government, you can’t be sure the search is not just one of those apparently pig-headed, possibly ideological decisions to do things differently for the sake of it, even perplexing your backbench along the way.

After all, the search has only been necessitated by the prime minister’s decision to remove Parkinson from his job prematurely in the first place.

The sin? Well, no one has come up with a better explanation than that Parkinson once headed the Department of Climate Change under the Labor government, as did another punted department secretary, Blair Comley.

Treasurer Joe Hockey has developed a happy and trusting working relationship with Parkinson and is already mourning his departure at year’s end.

But appointing department heads is one of those jobs in the remit of the PM of the day. Mandarins, after all, can be a powerful weapon in the prime ministerial armoury if the choose to use them.

Rise of the political staffer

However, as a book about the real life experience of PMs’ chiefs of staff points out, there has been a big change in the relationship between politicians and public servants in the past seven years.

The rise of the political staffer at the expense of public servants has been under way for decades.

But The Gatekeepers: Lessons from Prime Ministers’ Chiefs of Staff to be released next month – notes the more recent change of having someone running the Prime Minister’s Office who does not have a public service background.

Paul Keating and John Howard had former Treasury officers run their offices.

But Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard and now Tony Abbott put political staff in the job.

Equally, with time in a ministerial office now seen as a career negative, bureaucratic secondments have dropped sharply from the days when up to 70 per cent of staffers were seconded from the public service under Hawke and Keating.

The benefits of the old crossover, say authors Rod Rhodes and Anne Tiernan, was that “public servants understood the pressures and contingencies of ministerial life. Ministers understood how the public service could help them.

“Both politicians and public servants [now have]less knowledge of how government works and the amount and quality of expert advice was reduced.”

This lack of institutional memory affects everything about the way our politics plays out.

For example, former Labor ministers were genuinely surprised after the May 13 budget that the new government had simply picked up the same raw policy proposals the public service had been serving up for years and included them in the budget.

Their argument was that these were not things rejected by Labor on ideological grounds, or because they were too hard politically, but because they required significant work to turn them from public service policy goals into part of a coherent budget strategy, part of a political sales job, and which had some chance of getting through the Senate.

Their conclusion was that, whatever else you said about such policies, it seemed no one in the new government (which ended up racing to put its budget together) recognised these as policy chestnuts from the bureaucracy’s bottom drawer.

The effect has been that the Coalition has handed down such a political stinker of a budget that the government’s policy authority to prosecute a case for big policy change – has been savagely weakened.

Senate shambles

That has fed into the shambles in the Senate, and not just the Palmer shambles.

Everyone expected, for example, the government would be able to get the reintroduction of fuel tax excise through the Senate on the back of Green support.

But the Greens said no. A belief that there were deep divisions within the Greens on this issue caused the Coalition to decide this week to delay the passage of the legislation in the hope the Greens might change their position.

But the Greens say that while there are good arguments for taxing fuel more heavily, the context of the measure in a budget they say is highly regressive makes it non-negotiable.

Clive Palmer is saying the same thing about a range of other budget measures.

The net result of the negotiations with the Palmer United Party over both carbon tax repeal and the Future of Financial Advice laws is that both major parties are now privately dismissive of PUP as “the Coalition in drag” – a party which always end up coming home to the Coalition camp, after making some noise and some amendments which solve little.

Much of drama flowed from the PUP’s not knowing how Senate processes worked and, in Palmer’s case, not caring too much.

As the fortnight finished the two major parties were refocusing their attention on each other and the parameters of the brawl to come. The government will try to make Labor, rather than PUP, the issue on the budget. Labor will focus on the myriad policy inconsistencies and Hockey’s threat of even more cuts if he doesn’t get his way.

Carbon will become a battle on the cost of living. Labor will keep asking where the pledged cost cuts have gone, Abbott has already started a new fear campaign for the next election, arguing Labor wants to bring back ‘the carbon tax’.

Meantime, somewhere on the Indian Ocean, 153 asylum seekers sit on an Australian vessel, with the government refusing to land them, not wishing to dent its claim it has stopped the boats.

But there may be more to it than that. A department official told the Manus Island inquiry last week not one asylum seeker had been sent there since February, partly at the request of the PNG government.

What if Australia doesn’t actually have anywhere to send any new boatloads of asylum seekers? The public service might have some policy ideas to suggest.

Laura Tingle is the AFR’s political editor

The Australian Financial Review

BY Laura Tingle

Laura Tingle, The Australian Financial Review's
political editor, has worked in the parliamentary press gallery in
Canberra for more than 25 years. Laura has won two Walkley awards and
the Paul Lyneham Award for Excellence in Press Gallery Journalism and
has also been highly commended by the Walkley judges for
investigative reporting.

BY Laura Tingle

Laura Tingle, The Australian Financial Review's
political editor, has worked in the parliamentary press gallery in
Canberra for more than 25 years. Laura has won two Walkley awards and
the Paul Lyneham Award for Excellence in Press Gallery Journalism and
has also been highly commended by the Walkley judges for
investigative reporting.